The Homing

by John Saul

  And yet, as she slowly sat up, she realized that finally she really was beginning to feel a little better. The aching in her joints was still there, but not quite as bad as it had been before, and it seemed the fever was easing a little, too.

  Her stomach still felt like she might throw up any second, but she had a feeling she wasn’t actually going to do it.

  Was it possible that maybe there really wasn’t anything wrong with her, and that she was just feeling some side ef fects from the shot they’d given her? “You mean I can go home?” she asked, starting to get dressed, but still hoping the doctor would stop her, would refuse to let her leave the clinic.

  Ellen Filmore hesitated. “Julie, do you remember if Carl Henderson did anything to you before the bees attacked? Anything at all?”

  Once again Julie struggled to remember something—anything—that might account for what was happening to her. But all she could remember was talking to him—she couldn’t even remember what had been said—and then being surrounded by the swarm of insects. She shook her head. “He didn’t do anything at all,” she said. “All he did was try to help me.”

  At last, hearing Julie’s words, the tension that had been building in Karen through the examination was finally released. Apparently Julie really was all right, after all, and Otto, true to form, was just trying to make more trouble. “Come on,” she said, giving Julie an affectionate hug. “Let’s get home and thank our lucky stars Carl Henderson was there and had that medicine. Okay?” she asked, turning to Ellen Filmore.

  “I don’t see why not,” the doctor agreed, though reluctantly, her eyes still on Julie. “But if anything happens—if she starts feeling anything unusual—you call me.” She picked up the brown vial, which was still two-thirds full, and held it up for Julie to see. “If there are any side effects from this stuff, I want to know about them.”

  There are! Julie wanted to scream. Can’t you see? Can’t you see any of what’s happening to me? But once again she found herself powerless to utter the words, felt herself nodding and smiling though every fiber of her body was screaming, Help me, help me.

  One last time she tried to tell the doctor about the fever, the aching joints, the nausea and chills.

  But all she could do was smile. Weakly, she repeated the lie once more.

  “I’m fine.”

  Defeated by the strange and terrible power she felt inside her, Julie left the examining room and went out to the lobby, where Carl Henderson, his face pale, waited at one end of the room, and her stepfather at the other.

  She hesitated at the door, wanting to run to her stepfather, wanting to feel his arms around her, protecting her from whatever had invaded her body and her mind, wanting to beg him to help her.

  Instead, against her own will, she found herself walking over to Carl Henderson. “Thank you,” she heard herself say, the words coming from some part of her mind she hadn’t known existed. “If you hadn’t been there, I guess—well, just thank you.”

  Carl Henderson managed to betray nothing of the terror he’d been feeling as he waited for the results of Julie’s examination. He’d hoped she would die. She should have died! But she hadn’t. Yet, now, listening to her words, he realized he was safe. Though the shot hadn’t killed her, it had obviously done something to her.

  She remembered nothing.

  Taking her hand in both of his own, Carl Henderson squeezed it. “Any time,” he said. “Any time at all.” But even as he spoke the words, his eyes fixed on Julie’s face once more, and once more that unfathomable fury rose up inside him.

  Even now, right here in the hospital, he wanted to reach out and crush her.

  Why? Why?

  He had no idea.

  Julie, seeing his eyes begin to darken, seeing once more that spark of hatred, felt the edges of a fleeting memory stir in the depths of her mind. She jerked her hand away, but as quickly as the fragment of memory had come, it slipped beyond her reach.

  She hesitated, once more trying to grasp the fragile wisp of recollection, but then turned away.

  The memory was gone.

  A few minutes later, sitting in the backseat of the Chrysler between her mother and her sister, with Kevin and Russell sitting up front, Julie saw her stepfather peering at her in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re really sure you’re okay?” he asked. “Maybe you’d better take it easy the rest of the day.”

  Once again Julie opened her mouth to try to tell her stepfather exactly how she felt.

  Once again the words refused to come.

  “I’m fine,” she said yet again. “I really am.”

  But both her mind and her body told her she wasn’t fine at all.

  Something, she knew, had happened.

  Something inside her had gone dreadfully wrong, and she no longer had any control over what she said.

  How long, she wondered, would it be before she lost control over what she thought, too?

  But what if it had already happened?

  What if she was already crazy?

  That, she realized, was the scariest thing of all. Because if she really had gone crazy, what would she do next?

  Her eyes went to Molly, sitting beside her, her little hand clutching her own much bigger one.

  She trusts me, Julie thought. She trusts me, but she doesn’t have any idea what’s happening to me.

  What if I hurt her?

  What if I kill her?

  What if I kill everyone?

  The thought seemed to expand in her mind, filling it up, slowly blotting out everything else.

  Was this how the people she’d read about felt? The ones who suddenly started killing their friends, or their families, or even complete strangers?

  Had they felt like they were dying, and not even been able to ask anyone for help?

  Terror built in her once again.

  What if I’ve gone crazy? What if I start killing everyone?

  Silently, tearlessly, giving no clue of what was happening to her, Julie Spellman began to cry.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mark Shannon had been a deputy in Pleasant Valley for almost fifteen years. He and his partner, Manny Gomez, knew most of what was going on in the small community at any given time, and—or at least so Mark liked to think—everything that was going on, given enough time.

  Mark had come to Pleasant Valley from San Francisco, where after only five years he’d decided he’d had enough of being a big-city cop. He wanted to work somewhere where he was part of the community—where people would like him or dislike him simply because he was Mark Shannon, not because he wore a blue uniform.

  Overall, it had worked out pretty much as he’d hoped. He’d been absorbed into the life of the town years ago, and his only problem at present was that a couple of the kids he’d watched grow up—even coached in Little League—were turning into troublemakers, and he suspected that sooner or later he was going to have to arrest someone who only thought of him as a friend. On balance, though, it made his job easier that at least he and Manny were on a first-name basis with most of the local creeps and perverts.

  Until that morning, Carl Henderson had not been on the C-and-P list, but after listening to what Otto Owen—definitely a character, but neither a creep nor a pervert, so far as Mark knew—had to say, he wasn’t averse to adding Henderson to the short list of people upon whom he and Manny would keep an eye.

  The problem was that even though Otto’s story had sounded plausible, nothing else seemed to add up. Ellen Filmore, with whom Mark had talked for almost half an hour, had assured him that if any attack had been made on Julie Spellman, it couldn’t have been nearly as violent as the scene Otto Owen had described. Julie Spellman was not only most assuredly still a virgin, but Dr. Filmore’s examination had shown no signs of any kind of struggle, nor any bruises in her genital area.

  Now, for the last half hour, he’d been talking to Julie herself, and the whole thing was becoming murkier.

  He glanced at his scribbled no
tes. According to Otto, there was no question of what had been happening by the beehives. But according to Julie, nothing had happened, and her story had been backed up by Dr. Filmore.

  His next stop would be Carl Henderson, for all the good it would do him. No matter what had actually happened, he couldn’t imagine that Henderson was going to admit to an attempted rape.

  And that was the weird part, as far as Mark Shannon was concerned, for despite what both Julie Spellman and Ellen Filmore had told him, he had this feeling that something had, indeed, happened up by the beehives. For one thing, there was a place on the ground where it sure looked as if there’d been a struggle: deep gouges in the hard-packed earth where the gravel with which the area was littered had been ground down under some kind of force.

  Of course, it was just possible that Otto had doctored the scene himself; Mark was as aware as everyone else in town of how much Otto hated Henderson. On the other hand, Otto himself had told the deputy how angry he’d been at Julie earlier that morning. “But just ’cause she was rude to me doesn’t mean she should get raped,” he’d grated as he made his report.

  For the moment, despite his gut feeling, Shannon was pretty much stymied. Unfolding his six-foot-four-inch frame from the creaking rattan chair on Russell Owen’s shady front porch, he gazed out over the valley. The morning wasn’t too hot yet, and the air was clear enough today that you could see all the way across to the peaks of the Sierras, just visible in the distance.

  In the pasture adjacent to the barn, the horses were grazing; in the field to the north of the pasture, he could make out Russell’s small dairy herd.

  On mornings like this Pleasant Valley looked so ridiculously peaceful that it almost made Mark Shannon wonder why they needed his services at all.

  But of course he knew why they needed him: every now and then, he got a call like the one Otto had made this morning. This problem, though, looked like it was going to go away by itself, once Otto settled down a bit. “Well, I’ll talk to Carl Henderson,” he told Russell and Karen, who were flanking Julie on the wide glider that creaked even more than the wicker whenever it moved. “But if Julie says nothing happened, I guess that’s pretty much gonna wrap it up.” As he placed his hat carefully back onto his thick thatch of blond hair, he decided there was no point in telling them he also planned to keep a weather eye on Carl Henderson, just in case. After all, even though Julie seemed like a nice kid, there was just the off chance that she might have been leading Carl on, in which case there wouldn’t have been any bruises for Ellen Filmore to find.

  Time, Mark Shannon knew, would eventually tell the tale. As he said good-bye to the Owens, he made a mental note to keep his ear to the ground for any rumors about Julie Spellman, as well as Carl Henderson. Jail-bait was jail-bait, but if Pleasant Valley was going to have a Lolita on its hands, he wanted at least to be able to warn a few folks to give her as wide a berth as possible.

  That, he decided as he left the farm, was the major part of his job—keeping the wrong folks from getting together, so as few sparks would fly as possible.

  When Mark Shannon was gone, Karen turned worriedly to her daughter. “Maybe you ought to go upstairs and lie down for a while,” she mused.

  Julie shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. This time the words she uttered were almost true, for in the time that had passed since Dr. Filmore had given her the shot, she’d finally begun to feel better. The feverishness was almost gone, and the strange itchiness deep inside her had all but disappeared.

  Perhaps, after all, she wasn’t losing her mind.

  “All right,” Karen sighed. “If you say so.” As Julie got up and went into the house, Karen focused on Russell. “The hives,” she said, her tone telling Russell there was going to be no putting this discussion off any longer. “I told you I want those hives off the farm, and I meant it, Russell. First Molly almost died, then Julie.”

  “But they’re both fine,” Russell protested. “They both responded to the antitoxin.”

  “What if Carl Henderson hadn’t had it with him today?” Karen asked. “Julie was worse than Molly! She wouldn’t even have made it to San Luis Obispo!”

  “But he did have it,” Russell reminded her.

  “What if Dr. Filmore runs out of it?” she pressed. “My God, Russell, it’s not even on the market yet, and any of us could get stung any time!” She shook her head. “I just don’t want those hives anywhere around. Those bees are dangerous.”

  “They’re not that dangerous,” Russell replied doggedly. “And besides, we can’t just get rid of them. Without the bees, the alfalfa won’t pollinate. We can’t run the farm without them.”

  Karen stared at him. “You’re telling me that we’re totally dependent on them?”

  “It’s part of how a farm like ours works,” he said. “Alfalfa is a terrific crop, but it can’t pollinate itself. It has to have bees.”

  “There’s got to be another way,” Karen began, but Russell didn’t let her finish.

  Instead he explained to her what had happened when they’d used UniGrow’s fertilizer on the fields and the hives had been inadvertently sterilized. “We lost more than eighty percent of the crops,” he finished. “Without the bees to pollinate the fields, the alfalfa just disappeared.” His eyes fixed on hers. “We can’t let that happen again, Karen. One more year like that, and we’ll be wiped out. I mean wiped out, Karen,” he repeated, reading the doubt in her expression. “We’d lose the farm.”

  Karen took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out slowly in a long sigh. “All right,” she said, getting to her feet. “Then let’s think of something else. Come on.”

  They left the porch and started down the driveway toward the road. Crossing it, they walked hand in hand along the dirt track that led toward an immense berm of rocks. Behind the boulders lay the hives. “What if we moved them farther from the house?” Karen asked.

  Russell shook his head. “It’s not that easy to move hives. You have to move them at least five miles, or you lose the workers. Any distance much less than five miles, and the day after you move them, they’ll head out to gather pollen and nectar, but instead of returning to the new hive, they’ll go back to where the hive was before. And that’s the end of that. Since the homing pattern doesn’t change unless the territory is completely unfamiliar, they’ll just go back to the previous site and hover there until they die. The only way around it is to move them into a completely new environment, where nothing at all is familiar to them.”

  Karen turned to look at him. “Then we’ll have UniGrow bring in new hives and put them as far from the house as we can,” she said, as if the solution to the problem should have been as obvious to him as it was to her. “Or is there some reason why we can’t do that, either?”

  “I don’t know,” Russell admitted. “But I can talk to Carl Henderson about it. I suppose it depends on whether they have any hives available right now.” He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “We’ll figure it out, hon. And once we know what’s going on with the bees, and how come both the girls reacted to them, we’ll know what to do. But we have to give Carl a chance to check out the bees.” He bent over and kissed her. “I didn’t really know how worried you were, either.”

  “I wasn’t, until today,” Karen told him. “I thought Molly’s reaction was just a freak allergy, but when Julie—” She shuddered as she remembered her older daughter in the clinic, her flesh distended with swelling, her breathing labored and ragged, looking as if she might die at any moment.

  “We’ll get it solved,” Russell promised her. “Carl’s working on it, and he’ll get the UniGrow labs fired up, too. The worst scenario is that we live out the summer with these hives. Because of the contamination in the fields, the bees we have will be starting to go sterile, so we’ll have to get new ones next year anyway. But one way or another, we’re always going to have to have bees here. Without them, there’s just no farm at all.”

  Feeling less tha
n mollified, Karen nevertheless slipped her arm around Russell’s waist. Something, at least, was being done, and if they were all careful, maybe nothing else would happen.

  The sun was low in the western sky. In another fifteen or twenty minutes it would drop behind the foothills of the coast mountains, sending a shadow racing swiftly across the Owen farm, then across the breadth of the San Joaquin Valley toward the Sierras. For an hour after the shadow had fallen, dusk would linger. After only a little more than a week in Pleasant Valley, Karen had already discovered that the long evenings of slowly fading light were her favorite time of day. This evening, with the heat of the afternoon already broken and a cool night breeze already creeping from the ocean into the valley, promised to be nearly perfect. “I want to go for a walk,” Karen told Russell as they sat on the front porch, rocking the glider gently and gazing out over the farm. “I want to go down by the creek and listen to the running water, and I want to smell the fresh air. And I want you to hold my hand. I want us to pretend that we’re in one of those dumb romantic novels where no one ever has to deal with the real world.”

  Supper was over, and in the kitchen Julie and Kevin were doing the dishes. Molly was playing on the lawn with Bailey, though Karen wasn’t sure whether the dog had quite figured out that Molly was a nine-year-old girl, rather than a recalcitrant calf. The two of them had invented a chasing game, the rules of which, as far as Karen could tell, only the dog and the little girl could possibly understand.

  Inside the house the phone began to ring. Karen was about to get up when Russell stopped her. “Let one of the kids get it. If it’s for us, they’ll tell us.” Karen sank back onto the creaking contraption upon which they were sitting. A moment later Kevin appeared at the screen door.

  “Can we go to the movies?”

  “By ‘we,’ do you mean you and Julie, or you and Julie and Molly?” Russell countered.

  Kevin’s eyes clouded. “Come on, Dad—nobody else is taking little kids.”